EverQuest has been around for so long that balance between new players and long term players is becoming a real problem. Most newbie characters (in the EQ lingo, "toons" or "chars") actually belong to veteran players who give them castoff gear from their max level mains, i.e. "twink". If you're below level 60 and actually new to the game, you're nothing besides useless to a group full of twinks... but that's okay because nobody groups in the lower levels anymore anyhow, and mercenaries were added to the game to help players play solo.

Set in the fantasy land of Norrath, you start as a racenote Human, Barbarian, Dark Elf, Drakkin, Dwarf, Erudite, Half Elf, Halfling, High Elf, Gnome, Iksar, Ogre, Troll, Wood Elf and pick a character classnote Berserker, Cleric, Druid, Enchanter, Mage, Necromancer, Paladin, Ranger, Shadowknight, Shaman, Warrior, Wizard (which classes are available are restricted by race). Technically you have a hometown, but you start in a tutorial dungeon and then head straight to Crescent City (assuming you didn't just make Crescent City your hometown, which the game strongly encourages you to do). After perhaps hundreds of hours of Level Grinding and quests, you can reach a level where the wildlife, highly aggressive to your innocent adventurer, won't kill you in seconds. This can be sped up much by having a team member or five.

EverQuest has a sequel, EverQuest II. 2004 saw the release of a (mostly forgotten) RTS adaption, known as "Lords of Everquest". There's also a tabletop version of EverQuest and a couple of tie-in novels.

Many comics poke fun at the MMORPG scene but http://www.gucomics.com/ got their start from it. And although The Noob pokes fun at other MMORPGs, you better believe that EverQuest is its primo target.

Not to be confused within the series of author-to-player interactive RPGs from tgchan.

This game provides examples of:

Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Typical for a video game involving magic, elves, and divine entities, but of a more mundane note, food and drink are generally accepted as a necessity. Failing to keep food and drink in your inventory eventually results in stamina drain. This can prevent you from jumping, which is only a minor concern. Of greater impact is the fact that being hungry and thirsty prevents health and mana from regenerating naturally, which can be a bigger problem. However, you cannot die of starvation or dehydration.

Aliens Speaking English: Despite never having had contact with Norrath prior to the expansion opening, the inhabitants of Kuua (Omens of War) speak and understand the Norrathian Common Tongue.

All There in the Manual: A lot of the storyline that goes along with the expansions isn't readily available to players, or at best has to be pieced together bit by bit as you learn the lore.

And Your Reward Is Clothes: Subverted. Technically yes, you get rewarded for most things with clothes, but since your gear directly affects your stats, it's entirely functional.

Arbitrary Minimum Range: The game has a minimum range (usually 10 meters, just outside of melee combat for most monsters) required before anyone can use a ranged weapon such as a bow or throwing knives and shurikens.

The Artifact: This is very prominent in EverQuest. As the expansion packs mount up, old world content is increasingly useless - it's now possible to get armor dropped from random monsters better than the stuff you had to go through extensive questing to get back in the old days. Many zones, especially dungeons, lie abandoned for various reasons. Sometimes Sony reworks a dungeon to increase the level (this was notably done to Splitpaw and Cazic-Thule). However, since EverQuest isn't designed well for solo play, people all hunt in the same few zones since all the other players are there, rendering most of the game an artifact.

"Hail" itself is something of an artifact - it was made the standard greeting back when the game encouraged roleplaying and players to use medieval terminology.

Artistic License – Linguistics: Subverted by SOE themselves. A lot of fans criticized the content of the Gates of Discord and Omens of War for "nonsense names". Actually, SOE had put quite a lot of work into giving the worlds a Sumerian feel and even partially based the names off what little is known of the Sumerian language.

Asskicking Equals Authority: Most of the strongest raid bosses are in power because they're strong enough to force their will on others. The gods are a prime example of this.

Authority Equals Asskicking: On the other hand, in any NPC faction, it's virtually guaranteed that a mook's military or social rank will directly correlate to higher level and thus more ass-kicking potential. The strongest enemies in the game are often generals, kings, nobles, and lords.

Bad Powers, Bad People: Necromancers and Shadowknights in the original game had to worship an evil God, which meant some very severe faction hits if you were of a neutral (Human, Gnome, Erudite race.note Eventually bad Erudites got their own hometown) Of course, as mentioned above, old-world factions mean jack-squat now.

Big Bad: Most every pack came with its own. The original game had Vox and Nagafen. Kunark added Trakanon. Velious had Kerafyrm. Gates had Tunat` Muram Cuu Vauax. Omens had Mata Muram. And it just keeps on going.

Big Boo's Haunt: LOTS of them. In just the initial EverQuest, there was Befallen, Lower Guk, the Estate of Unrest, and Mistmoore Castle. Those are entire zones - many zones had smaller Haunts (for example, the spectre tower in the Oasis of Marr). Ruins of Kunark added Kurn's Tower, Kaesora, and the City of Mist. Scars of Velious added more still... and it just keeps on going.

Big Creepy-Crawlies: It's an ongoing joke how most of the natural wildlife (wolves, panthers, snakes, etc...) are normally sized, but the bugs are all monstrous.

Body Horror: Many of the so called "creatures" of the Legion of Mata Muram were intentionally subjected to horrifying mutilations in order to heighten their own hunting skills and malevolent influences.

Blood-Stained Letter: There is one that drops from mobs in the Dead Hills which urges you to leave the country and never come back.

Breast Plate: Played straight with leather and chain armor which, for most females, has a considerable Cleavage Window, and in the case of dark elves, their chain armor is little more than chainmail lingerie. However, the game completely averts this trope with plate armor on its female models, which is depicted providing full, practical coverage.

Canon Discontinuity: In terms of the lore and history behind the world of Norrath, things are split up into two categories. First is that anything actually found inside EverQuest, EverQuest II (up to a certain point in time for its own storyline with EverQuest), and EverQuest Online Adventures is official canon to the games. There's also the tabletop Pen & Paper versions of the games, which have much more detailed stories and lore, but aren't considered canon unless it's also covered in the game.

Cast from Hit Points: Indirectly. Both Necromancers and Shamans have a line of spells that convert health into mana, which can then be used to cast spells.

Chekhov's Gunman: The Priest(s) of Discord. Around from the earliest days as a method of opting into Player Vs. Player on non PvP servers, they suddenly became very important shortly before the Omens of War expansion was released.

Meldrath the Malignant was a gnome necromancer rangers had to kill for a mid level armor quest when the game launched. 8 years later, it was revealed that that Meldrath was a decoy, and the real Meldrath became a high end raid target.

Fippy Darkpaw is a gnoll whose only reason for existence is to howl at the entire zone that he was coming to Qeynos, which he did and was promptly killed by the NPC guards there if an adventurer didn't get him first. It is a canon running joke that he is spawning again for the 5 billionth time to quickly die. Many years later, he reappears elsewhere as a powerful boss, determined to get revenge on Qeynos and become a demi-god. Funnily enough, the wimpy version of him still appears, threatens everyone and quickly dies.

Critical Hit: At lower levels, warriors gain the innate ability to critical hit. Other melee-oriented classes can gain the ability much later on. Offensively-aligned spell casters can also critically hit with their spells.

Continuing Is Painful: EQ used to have one of the nastiest, if not the single nastiest, continue penalties in all of gamingnote Dying meant the character returning to its "bind point" completely naked. No weapons, no armor, no food, no water, no money. You could not get any of those items back unless you returned to your corpse (sometimes having to run, without equipment, across an entire continent filled with things trying to kill you again) to loot it before it—and all your stuff—rotted away. Each death was accompanied by a reduction in total experience earned, with the specific penalty being tied to the amount of experience required to complete the character's previous level — so if you had just advanced from one of the now-extinct "Hell Levels" that had XP requirements exponentially larger than levels before or after them, then your XP penalty could entail losing over half a level, constituting potentially a loss of days worth of gameplay. Loss of experience meant that a character could also lose levels—woe unto the caster who had just leveled-up and scribed a new spell, but now can't cast it to help themselves recover. Some of this penalty could be mitigated by a resurrection spell being cast on your corpse (you ported directly to your corpse for looting, and some exp restored), but nothing replaced the lost experience entirely. Also, if you happened to die en route to your original corpse, you lost more exp, and were re-transported back to your bind point and had to restart the process. Players sometimes being stuck for hours or days trying to retrieve a corpse and all their stuff were everyday occurrences.. However, ever since SOE took over from Verant, the penalty has gotten steadily less painful, with the exp loss reduced and corpse runs fully done away with. See Death Is a Slap on the Wrist below.

Convection Schmonvection: Lava hurts. Quite a lot in some zones. However players can float or jump right over it without any problems.

Damage Discrimination: Applies to players on non-Pv P servers, where players are completely incapable of damaging one another even with area-effect spells. Similarly for NPCs, Unless an encounter is scripted so that an NPC is meant to take damage from another NPC, they will all be immune to one another's area attacks. This also extends to NPCs that use area-effect spells in melee. Players will be injured by their own targeted area-effect spells if they use them at close range, but an NPC has no such risk, and it's common for many spell-casting NPCs to use such spells in dungeons when surrounded by players.

Damager, Healer, Tank: One of the first games to introduce this dynamic, EverQuest actually expanded upon it considerably by having some classes dedicated almost entirely to other roles. Enchanters, for example, inflict rather poor damage (unless using a charmed pet, which carries its own risks), and cannot heal or tank, however they are considered extremely valuable and even required by some players because of their exceptional crowd control capabilities.

Deity of Human Origin: Zebuxoruk, the "Ungod" of Knowledge. It is said that he was born a Human, and he found the secret to obtaining godhood, but for some reason or another, sooner or later, will revert back into a mortal Human. He's reverted back and forth so many times that he's lost count. He was even imprisoned in the Plane of Time for the express purpose of making sure that his knowledge of how to obtain godhood would never be shared with mortals. The consequence would have catastrophic effects on the universe if everyone suddenly became a god themselves. When Mayong Mistmoore managed to become a god later on, he quickly proved to everyone exactly what they were all fearing.

Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Averted. While it's possible for the players to battle and even defeat the gods on their own home planes, doing so requires an army of players all equipped in powerful artifacts and wielding advanced magic. In fact, most deities have the ability to simply snuff out the life force of any mortal on their plane, commonly called a "Death Touch," though they can only perform this attack once every minute or so. This trope is also further averted by the fact that, as we later learn during Planes of Power and subsequent expansions, the "gods" you defeat during raids are just avatars of the gods themselves, and the actual gods are far, far too powerful to be threatened by mortals.

Difficulty Spike: One of the things that's gotten more pronounced in the latter days of the game. Nowadays EQ holds your hand through your newbie days... and then suddenly kicks you in the nuts right around the time you hit level 25. In the old days, the game was happy to kick you in the nuts the second your brand-new character spawned, though, so this is actually a small improvement...

As the updates go on, the difficulty spike kicks in at a higher level.

Down the Drain: Kedge Keep is entirely underwater. Siren's Grotto in Velious also has large sections under water. Some zones, such as the Qeynos Sewers have significant underwater areas.

Dual Wielding: Warriors, Rangers, Rogues, Monks, Bards and Beastlords can all do this

Easter Egg: Tons and tons of them, too many to list them all. But we'll hit a few of the bigger ones...

In the Qeynos Sewers, some graffiti say "Aradune is Stinky". Aradune was the character of the original game's creator Brad McQuaid.

Elemental Plane: The game has a bunch of these. Indeed, an entire expansion is called "The Planes of Power", and contains something like 15 different planes. And there are more planes from other expansions.

Enough to Go Around: It's not uncommon for the target of a quest to drop 3 or 6 copies of the needed quest item, even if that item is a hand or a head.

Expansion Pack: Many many of these. They churn them out so often. As of January 2018, there are 24 total.

Feelies: The retail versions of the game's expansion packs all came with a cloth or paper map of the world of Norrath, focusing on the new area of that expansion. Planes of Power went one step further and included a figurine of Firiona Vie.

Floating Continent: Several, usually as high end raiding zones. First there was the Plane of Sky, a set of eight connected islands floating above East Freeport, with progressively harder monsters to fight as the raid force advances through each one. In the Planes of Power expansion, one could eventually enter the elemental Plane of Air, {called Eryslai: the Kingdom of Wind,) home to Xegony, Queen of Air, late in the expansion's storyline. The Buried Sea featured Solteris, the Throne of Ro, a plane which functions as Norrath's sun, and the setting of the final showdown against vampire deity Mayong Mistmoore. Finally, Secrets of Faydwer introduced Fortress Mechanotus, a massive floating continent constructed by Meldrath the Malignant, which is comprised of six zones and plays host to the majority of the expansion's quests and raid encounters.

If you're not an Iksar or Vah Shir, then you can do the newbie armor quests. They offer better armor anyway, and you can usually get the complete set by level 15, with most pieces available by level 10.

Good Powers, Bad People: Clerics (the strongest pure healing class in the game) can worship three of the four nastiest gods. Overlaps with Pragmatic Villainy, as a Shadowknight who dies because he isn't receiving any heals isn't a very effective shadowknight.

Grey and Gray Morality: Velious, specifically the feud between the dwarves of Thurgadin, the giants of Kael Drakkel, and the drakes of Skyshrine. Deciding which of these three factions your guild would ally with was a major part of the end-game raiding dynamic. note Each of the three factions gave rewards in the form of class-specific armor. This was the strongest armor available when the expansion was current, however each suit of armor followed a different statistical theme. One faction's armors might emphasize resistances, while another might emphasize hit points and mana, and so on. Choosing which faction to follow was largely determined by a particular guild's playstyle and member makeup, though it was just as often determined simply by which set of armor the leadership wanted for themselves.

At first glance it's easy to assume that the warlike giants are the bad guys and the friendly dwarves are the good guys. (All players are welcome in the dwarf city upon arrival, but only worshippers of Rallos Zek are welcome in the city of the giants.) However, a closer look reveals that things are more complicated. Many citizens of both cities are weary of the perennial war and would rather have peace, but are forced to fight by power hungry rulers. The dwarf monarch even goes so far as to send assassins (in the form of players doing a certain quest line) to kill "traitors" who are mostly political enemies, dissidents, or those who advocate making peace with the giants.

The pantheon has a bit of gray morality as well. The gods of positive attributes like growth and love are often seen as good, both in the game world and by players, while gods of negative attributes like fear and disease are seen as evil. However, during an anniversary event where players had a chance to perform tasks for each god some of the evil gods gave their version of the story. The god of disease may be a literal plague on the world, but without him beast populations would be out of control. The god of war is often seen as a god of violence and slaughter, but he's just as much a god of strength and honor. The god of fear may be a source of terror and dread, but without fear to give them pause people end up putting themselves in unnecessary danger.

Hand of Glory: Parts of a Hand of Glory are spread amongst the building wings of Charasis. Once assembled it acts as the master key of Charasis, bypassing the need to pick the locks every time you visit.

Helping Would Be Killstealing: MMORPGs such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft are the Trope Namer. In these games, killing monsters is a main source of personal growth for your character. If a monster attacks you and hurts you, you normally do NOT want someone to save you. If an NPC is being attacked by multiple people or parties, whichever group construct ends up removing 51% of the monster's health actually takes the kill and its loot.

This is even worse in EverQuest. While in World of Warcraft, you typically get XP based on the damage you did, in EverQuest, whichever group did the most damage to the enemy got all of the experience. Furthermore, in World of Warcraft, the first player to attack an enemy "tagged" it and was allowed to get the loot even if someone else killed it, while in EverQuest, the person that gets the XP also gets to loot.

Hopeless Boss Fight: Kerafyrm in the Scars of Velious expansion. He had insane HP and attack power for the time and was not intended to be defeated, instead utterly destroying your raid party and the inhabitants of Skyshrine, then disappearing from the game until he resurfaced as the killable Big Bad in Secrets of Faydwer.

Each server could only wake up the Velious version of Kerafyrm once, and that was it. The guardians keeping him asleep dropped very powerful weapons and armor that everyone desired. The first servers who woke him up soon found that he permanently killed those guardians and the loot they dropped. Despite its hostile environment full of griefers, the Rallos Zek PVP server was among the very last to wake him up. The top 3 strongest and largest guilds actually banded together to kill Kerafyrm. It came down to little more than a zerg rush. You die, you get rezzed, you grab your weapon off your corpse, and you go back in to die again. In the end, he was killed. He had no loot table.

Humans Are White: Yes, all Humans are white - there's one human male model that looks like it could have some Asian features, though it's hard to tell (faces are low resolution). Instead of having black humans, they made the entire race of Erudites black skinned. This was a technical limitation at the time, since the game was pushing the limits of personal computers available during the late 90s, and there was no memory budget for every PC to have multiple skin color textures for every race. This is averted in the sequel, which added more skin colors and a higher amount of facial customization.

Human Subspecies: There are 4 playable human races: The base line human, the burly barbarians, the scholarly erudites, and the dragon touched drakkin. The drakkin are further divided into 6 sub-races based on their dragon heritage, which affects both their appearance and what type of damage is inflicted by their breath weapon.

Interface Screw: The blind spell and alcohol. Certain bosses try to pull these off now and then.

Taken up to 11 when the game was first released. The UI was rendered alongside the rest of the graphics in the game, so being blinded also hid your health, inventory, and even your chat window! This meant that being blinded effectively rendered you deaf as well.

I'm a Humanitarian: Every playable race drops meat that can be used in baking to make food that gives stat bonuses applicable to the race. Dark Elves and High Elves give bonuses to casting attributes (Int, Wis, Cha), Trolls and Ogres give bonuses to physical stats, etc.

Invulnerable Civilians: Both averted and played straight. There are plenty of unkillable NPCs, mostly to prevent players from being unable to start or complete a quest involving that NPC. However, there are also plenty of civilian NPCs that are very killable, even inhabitants of player character cities. Also, an entire city full of snow dwarves will be massacred if the players fail an event to protect the city from attacking giants.

Of course, the aversion in the original wound up with many players suffering their first death by accidentally attacking their guildmaster. Since the keystroke for attacking was 'a', and if you forgot to hit enter before you started typing your dialogue...

Item Crafting: The crafting system in the original version was not very player-friendly. Especially in the old days. There was a blacksmithing guide entitled Click Your Way to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

Kill Enemies to Open: A variation. The insanely powerful but mostly insane prismatic dragon known as Kerafyrm was put to sleep by Veeshan, the God of Dragons for his crimes against dragonkind. The catch was that four dragons had to spend the rest of eternity as warders to ensure that the spell keeping him asleep was never broken. Players had to kill all four warders in order to wake him up... but the first few guilds in the game to do so quickly found out that waking him up was a bad thing. Kerafyrm would rampage out of the tomb, go over to the city of Skyshrine and go on a rampage there, and then go on a rampage in the Temple of Veeshan before finally leaving for good. This happened once and ONLY once per server. The Warders, who contained exceptionally powerful loot, were dead for good.

Loads and Loads of Sidequests: The game is ALL ABOUT THIS. It has Quest in its name! The majority of the thousands upon thousands of quests found in the game are sidequests compared to the few quests actually relating to each expansion's storylines.

The three major cities of Velious qualify somewhat. While the dwarf and dragon factions are not directly connected, some quest text hints that they like each other no better than they like the giants.

Another example is found in the Omens of War expansion. While a handful of native dragorn are eventually willing to accept Norrathians as allies, far more of them see them as just more invaders and react to their arrival with hostility, leading to a three way war between Norrathians, Muramites, and loyalist dragorn.

Bards have abilities and skills that make them a mix of almost every other class in the game. They can wear plate and dual wield like warriors, have a run speed buff like druids and shaman, can heal, can restore mana, charm, and mesmerize NPCs like enchanters, do damage over time like necromancers, direct damage like wizards, have lockpicking skills like rogues, etc. However, none of these abilities is really effective enough that a bard can function as a primary role in a group. Their healing song heals too slowly for them to be a healer, their mesmerize songs are somewhat unreliable and difficult to juggle between multiple targets, making them less effective at crowd control, they lack sufficient agro-generation and defense to act as a tank, and their raw damage output is too low for them to qualify as a dedicated damage dealer. Despite this, the overall utility they bring to a group makes them highly valued by most players.

Druids are the spell-caster version of this. They receive the widest variety of spell types including heals, run speed boosts, stat buffs, damage-over-time, direct damage, damage shields, snares, teleportation, and regeneration spells. However, with exception to their snare spells, there are other classes that have superior versions of these spells. Druids cannot heal as effectively as clerics, can't buff stats or do damage-over-time as well as shamans, can't direct damage or teleport as well as wizards, can't damage shield as well as magicians, and so on.

Munchkin: Munchkinism fairly quickly became the standard way to play the game. It's hard to remember back in the days when roleplaying was actively encouraged in the instruction manuals and in the game itself, and "twinking" (higher level characters giving lower level ones gear and weapons better than anything they could get for themselves) was extremely discouraged.

Lampshaded: One NPC has the following response when you ask him about his quest: "Well I haven't figured out that part yet. I guess I'll slay a dragon, maybe save a princess or two. You know the normal stuff. I don't want to get too crazy heheh, you know like calculate which weapon is the most efficient and debate over it in public forums to no end."

Myth Arc: Starting with The Scars of Velious expansion, every expansion has had one.

Neglectful Precursors: The Combine Empire was seen as this for a long time. The truth was a little more complicated

Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: In the Dragons of Norrath expansion, killing Yar'Lir unleashes a curse upon The Nest, making things a whole lot more unpleasant.

Played a second time in the very next expansion, Depths of Darkhollow. Killing Mayong Mistmoore, the expansion's Big Bad, propelled him to godhood, whereafter he proceeded to wreak havoc upon Norrath's pantheon of deities until being put down for good in The Buried Sea.

Ninja Looting: This was a big problem in EQ's early days, back when it was run by Verant Interactive. It can still be a problem sometimes. For group mobs for about two minutes after you kill something, only those in the group can loot it, after that it is open to anyone. Raids tend to mostly be in zones restricted to just those in the raid, which is normally your guildmates, so that tends to be pretty safe.

Nintendo Hard: Ahh, the old days. The next time someone in your WoW party complains when you wipe and have to run all the way back to the dungeon, try telling them that in original EQ, you did the same thing, but not as a ghost - nope, you were alive. And naked, because all your equipment stayed on your corpse until you retrieved it. From in the middle of all the nasty things that killed you the first time. No arrows or minimaps, so you'd better remember exactly where you were. If you were unlucky enough to forget to get somebody to cast a bind spell at the nearest city, you might be facing a run across a continent, too. It was not unusual to die several times trying to retrieve your corpse. Oh, by the way, every time you die, you lose experience points. Including de-leveling. At higher levels, the ratio of amount lost to how long it would take to get it back got more and more dire. At the high levels, things became insanely stressful. People had breakdowns.

The most difficult was the Plane of Fear. Zoning in, you would very soon be attacked by a large group of enemies. Without a large strong force, you would die. So, if you died inside Plane of Fear, you would run back, enter the zone and die again. Guilds would die inside, attempt to retrieve their corpses (which had their gear on them, and without the gear you are far weaker than normal) and die repeatedly again. The most powerful guilds would often wind up assisting weaker guilds by "breaking" the zone for them (that is, kill off most of the NPCs near the zone in area so others could enter without quickly dying). And Plane of Fear was not the only zone with this.

Nobody Poops: Averted. Kaladim has a giant statue of a dwarf above the entrance, and an NPC sends you off to kill kragploom aviaks because they keep perching on the statue and then pooping on it.

No Fair Cheating: In response to the rising power of players and the possibility of single groups or even solo players gaining enough power to tackle raid-scale content, the developers instituted a mechanic wherein anyone over level 51 that attacks (or even heals an attacker of) Lord Nagafen or Lady Vox, two of the raid-tier dragons from the original game, will immediately be teleported out of the dungeon.

Non-Mammal Mammaries: Similarly to the Breast Plate trope, Everquest does a relatively good job averting this. EQ has three major non-mammal races - Iksar, Froglok, and Sarnak. The female Iksar have a slightly hourglass shaped figure note the original female Iksar models were identical to the male ones with the exception of brightly colored markings on their faces, but no actual breasts. Female Frogloks just have slimmer heads and color schemes ranging more towards pastels. Sarnaks aren't a playable race and don't have separate gender models.

And yet there is "Bladder of Lizard Milk" for sale at various Kunark vendors...

Nostalgia Filter: A lot of people have this for early EQ. Sometimes, it's genuine "it was better when it sucked" sentiment. Sometimes, it's a desire to return to a time when their class was part of the Holy Trinity and groups could not twitch without them.

Interestingly enough, this has led to the rise of privately-run EverQuest servers that seek to scale back some of the more recent expansions, including a very popular one that intends to limit content to the first three expansions, the last of which was released in 2001.

You know how Nillipus (that brownie who wanders around Rivervale) says, if you kill him, "I put a curse on your soul and a pox on this land"? He. Wasn't. Kidding. By the time EverQuest II takes place, Rivervale is overrun by Nightbloods and Shadowed Men (essentially The Legions of Hell).

Only Six Faces: Literally. Each race and gender had exactly 6 faces to choose from for character customization. It wasn't all that big an issue though, as at release it was still better than most.

Our Elves Are Better: Played completely straight. EverQuest has the superior High Elves, the woodsy Wood Elves, and the evil Dark Elves. And the Half Elves, who mostly fit in pretty well with the easy going Wood Elves.

Our Gnomes Are Weirder: EverQuest gnomes are based heavily on the Dragonlance tinker gnomes, although they're much more competent (but still blamed for 99% of everything that ever goes wrong.)

Our Ogres Are Hungrier: Ogres are big an' stoopid, thanks to a curse. When Rallos Zek tried to invade all the planes at the same time, the other Gods banded together and cursed all the races he created. The Ogres were his favorites.

Our Trolls Are Different: Again, EverQuest based their trolls off the Dungeons and Dragons version of them. Tall, green, weak against fire, and the least intelligent of all the playable races.

Our Vampires Are Different: EQ's vampires are generally orlokian in design. In the hack and slash Champions of Norrath, the powerful vampires tend to be like Dracula Classic, but most vampires are unintelligent orlokian types with spidery limbs.

Passion Is Evil: Each god rules over a different physical or emotional domain, and all are clearly defined as Good, Evil, or Neutral. Among the evil gods are Cazic Thule and his daughter Terris Thule, who controls fear and nightmares, and Tholux Paells, the Demi-god of Lust. Among the good gods are Erollisi Marr is the goddess of Love and Quellious the god of Peace and Tranquility. An interesting note is that the extremely evil Rallos Zek, god of War, created Sullon Zek, Demi-goddess of rage and anger. Sullon herself and her domain are considered neutral.

Power-Up Food: Offered through the baking and brewing tradeskills - smoked Wood Elf, anyone? The stat boosts are usually very minor, however, and the best food tends to be an utter pain in the ass to produce, due to the rarity of the ingredients and the zillion subcombines required to make the final product. Want to make a baker cry? Ask them about the Misty Thicket Picnicnote An item combine that required the player not only to be a Baker with maxed skill, but also to have leveled up to reasonable competency: Tailoring, Smithing, Brewing, and Foraging (not available to all race/class combos, forcing non-Foragers to buy supplies from players at a premium). Components available at vendors were not found in one location, but rather at no fewer than 7 different vendors scattered hither and yon. Players would spend months leveling up their crafting skills just to make a single attempt. or the Halas Ten Pound Meat Pie.

Punny Name: Oh so many of them. There are whole web pages which list them.

Rainbow Pimp Gear: Averted. Initially present, the game introduced armor dye so you could change the color of armor you didn't like.

Serious Business: Hardcore raiding players and guilds can be... to put in the most positive term possible, "intense".

Sexy Packaging: Firiona Vie was featured very prominently on the artwork of the original game's box and the first 13 expansions. This then stopped abruptly and utterly - box art since then has generally featured the expac's main antagonist.

Stripperiffic: Firiona Vie - the character, not the zone. Any female character without armor equipped. And for the first dozen or so expansions, any female character on the box art.

Especially silly in the case of barbarians. The typical barbarian male wears nothing but boots and a kilt, while the average female is dressed the same but also wearing a laced together piece of leather over her chest, and they live in the middle of a region of icy, frozen tundra. Handwaved by making it a part of barbarian culture to defy the cold and prove one's mettle by... refusing to wear a shirt? Silly barbarians.

Amazingly, Firiona Vie managed to get more Stripperiffic as time went on, moving from a sports bra to two patches of fabric laced together.

Suppressed History: The history of Norrath is highly detailed and was recorded by numerous races over countless millennia. Shortly after Humans came about, the great Combine Empire had rose up and nearly united all the races across Norrath in peace. An assassination attempt is what caused the Empire to ultimately fall, and the remnants moved up to the invisible moon, Luclin, just to remain safe from would-be attackers. Over the course of one night, all history of the Combine Empire's existence was lost, as was the knowledge of the magical arts known as Geomancy. This time period is appropriately known as the Lost Age.

Many mobs are set immune to certain spells for no reason except to screw over the player. Certain named melee mobs, for example are made immune to being immobilized or slowed down, just so they can run up and beat down caster classes, interrupting all their spells. Certain areas have enemies that are not only immune to changes in their movement speed, but also have extremely high magic resistance, just so they can run away from you and train the entire dungeon on you, and you are nearly powerless to stop them unless you are insanely overleveled for the zone. Named monsters tended to be MUCH more powerful then their level would suggest (no elite mob tag here), defeating solo players even when you were far enough above their level that you would get almost no experience. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Thieves' Cant: Rogues have a special class language called "Thieves' Cant." Only Rogues can speak it.

Time Travel: Plane of Time, The Curse Begins, the entire Seeds of Destruction expansion.

Touch of Death: Many raid bosses have this as an attack. It happens instantly, and instantly kills the affected player, no save, no possible defense. Many will do this only at the start of the battle, but some can do this every x seconds. Note that death causes loss of hard earned experience.

Tree Top Town: Fucking Kelethin, with ramps between platforms that have NO markers to indicate where they are and no railings. Ever. At all. Common side effects of running around Kelethin are dying and increased safe fall skill.

Trope Codifier: One can rest assured that EQ popularized just about every single trope we associate with MMORPGs today.

The Usual Adversaries: The gnolls. Gnolls aren't much of a serious threat, but they are always, always, always making a nuisance of themselves.

World of Buxom: The females from just about every race has the equivalent of a D cup for that race's size. That gnome may have small breasts, but they're huge for a gnome. The female models were developed by a woman who admittedly wanted them to look both heroic and sexy at the same time.

You Can't Get Ye Flask: Quests are triggered by certain words. Usually the relevant [words] are enclosed in [brackets] so you know which ones to use, but sometimes the word has to be used in a certain format. It can get quite confusing. Sometimes an NPC gives you a [key word or phrase] as part of a quest reward and if you didn't memorize it right on the first try, you're stuck unless you can find the correct line in a FAQ.

In older content, you also had to say the [thing you had to say] in an appropriately meaningful sentencenote for example, if an NPC said something about [orcs] the game would respond to "which orcs?" but not "why orcs?". The game could sometimes be unreasonably fussy about accepting things, and so for most later content all you have to do is repeat the bracketed word.

You Shouldn't Know This Already: Sometimes if you say the [phrase] that is supposed to get an NPC to work with you on a [quest] before you're either high enough level to work on the quest or on the appropriate step, that NPC will ask you if you don't have any gnoll pups (or similar low level trash mobs) to go slay.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy